THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015
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are supposed to be providing answers
to this. It is not an answer to simply
continue to build in the West Bank and
to destroy the homes of the other folks
you're trying to make peace with and
pretend that that's a solution."
In the evening, Kerry flew from Ber-
lin to Vienna, where, in meetings
with his Russian, Turkish, and Saudi
counterparts, the focus would turn to
Syria. Some of the reporters on the
State Department beat recall with nos-
talgia a time when Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice regularly came to
the back of the plane to brief them,
often on the record. Kerry is prone to
senatorial over-talk and the occasional
ga e; recently, he had to walk back an
infelicitous statement that there was a
"rationale" to the murders of the Char-
lie Hebdo sta , as opposed to the more
recent attacks in Paris. White House
o cials have made it clear that his bouts
of verbal indiscipline are unwelcome,
and his trips to the back of the plane
are less frequent. Recently, at the Saban
Forum, a Middle East conference in
Washington, D.C., Martin Indyk,
Kerry's former aide, interviewed him
onstage and began by saying, with a
smile, that he would be the only one
asking questions, because Kerry's sta ers
"were worried about your answers."
The State Department beat is try-
ing.The reporters are sardined into the
back of the plane for endless flights
and, upon arrival, spend hours waiting
in hotel and airport holding rooms,
interrupted by bursts of stenography.
While Kerry met with Sergei Lavrov,
his Russian counterpart, at the Hotel
Imperial, we pecked at the birdseed of
the pool report, a couple of precisely
quoted non-quotes. The pool reporter
concluded with this plaintive note:
"That's it. My recorder was running for
a total of twenty-two seconds."
But the talks were of real significance.
Kerry was trying to persuade his inter-
locutors, especially the Saudis, of the
wisdom of including Iran, which has
worked with the Russians to prop up
Assad, in future talks.The developments
in Syria were clear enough: at least two
hundred thousand dead, four million
refugees, millions more displaced. The
regime---backed by Iranian troops, Hez-
bollah guerrillas, Russian air strikes on
rebel outposts, and support from the
Iraqi Shiite militias---has regained its
footing and maintains a hold over up
to two-thirds of the population. ISIS is
under increasing attack from coalition
air strikes and Kurdish ground troops,
but it has moved the fight abroad.
The dispiriting reality of American
foreign policy in the twenty-first cen-
tury has been neatly summarized in Po-
litico by Philip Gordon, the former
N.S.C. o cial: "In Iraq, the U.S. inter-
vened and occupied, and the result was
a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. in-
tervened and did not occupy, and the
result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the
U.S. neither intervened nor occupied,
and the result is a costly disaster." Some
foreign-policy experts, from Leon Pa-
netta, the former C.I.A. director, to
Richard Haass, the president of the
Council on Foreign Relations, predict
that the conflicts that have emerged
from the Arab uprisings will lead to a
"Thirty Years' War," a protracted, re-
gional bloodletting reminiscent of the
religious wars in Central Europe that
began with the fragmentation of the
Holy Roman Empire, in 1618.
The violent swirl of uncertainties
brings out the President's native caution.
The most consequential political act of
Obama's early career was a brief appear-
ance, in 2002, at an antiwar demon-
stration in Federal Plaza, in downtown
Chicago, where he declared that the im-
pending invasion of Iraq was "dumb" and
would "require a U.S. occupation of un-
determined length, at undetermined cost,
with undetermined consequences."That
speech set him apart from both Kerry
and Clinton, who, as senators, voted to
give Bush the right to use force in Iraq,
and it set the ideological template for his
foreign policy, not least on Syria. Vali
Nasr, a former State Department adviser
to Hillary Clinton and Richard Hol-
brooke, told me, "Obama hasn't changed
his position from 2011. He is always con-
cerned that it's a fool's errand, a slippery
slope to another Iraq, pouring blood and
treasure into another conflict."
Kerry's senior aides are not hesitant
to say that both as chairman of the Sen-
ate Foreign Relations Committee and
as Secretary of State he has disagreed
strongly with Obama on Syria. "Obama
prioritizes avoiding any entanglements
where it is uncertain that such an in-
tervention will work," a State Depart-
ment o cial told me. Kerry, who sees
that the crisis has threatened the sta-
bility of Jordan, Lebanon, and other
states in the region and has provided
ISIS with a base, in Raqqa and Ramadi,
has, the o cial said, "much more faith
in our ability to avoid a slippery slope."
From the beginning of the civilian
uprisings in Syria, in 2011, and the re-
gime's escalating and bloody reaction,
many of Obama's advisers have argued
for a more aggressive policy: arming and
funding the "moderate rebels"; air strikes
on Damascus; taking out Assad's heli-
copters and planes, which drop barrel
bombs packed with shrapnel, explosives,
and, sometimes, chlorine; the establish-
ment of safe zones and a no-fly zone.
In 2012, the C.I.A. director, David Pe-
traeus; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
General Martin Dempsey; Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta; Samantha Power,
who was then a national-security ad-
viser; and Secretary of State Clinton
pressed Obama to support vetted reb-
els against the regime. Kerry---who was
influenced by the relatively successful, if
belated, interventions in the Balkans, in
the nineties, and also by the calamitous
decision not to intervene in Rwanda in
1994---joined this chorus when he re-
placed Clinton. But no one could con-
vince Obama that deeper involvement
would avoid a repetition of the Iraq fiasco.
Kerry was a critical actor in the most
humbling episode of the Syrian drama.
Obama had warned Assad that he would
be crossing a "red line" if he used chem-
ical weapons, saying that such an act
would "change my calculus." In August,
2013, a year after the "red line" warning,
Assad's forces, according to Western in-
telligence services and an independent
U.N. commission, fired rockets armed
with sarin on Ghouta, a suburb of Da-
mascus, killing hundreds. The U.S. pre-
pared to attack with cruise missiles. In
a speech insisting that Assad give up all
his chemical arms, Kerry referred to the
"lessons" of the Holocaust and of Rwan-
da. General Dempsey said, "Our finger
was on the trigger." Obama warned of
an American attack, although Kerry, fol-
lowing the President's minimizing lead,
allowed that the strike would be "unbe-
lievably small." Then, without consult-
ing Kerry, Obama stepped back, saying
that he would have to get congressional